The Biden Administration’s recent release of policies laying out enforcement priorities and ending worksite enforcement have, in practice if not law, accomplished the Squad’s goal of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On the policy front, this means the one agency in the Federal government with the mission of locating and removing illegal aliens is now virtually defunct.
The Border Crisis is obvious to anyone who is paying attention to the situation at the southern border. Recent data leaks have shown just how many illegal aliens are being released into the U.S., and DHS Sec. Mayorkas has been clear that he has no plans to secure the border or enforce immigration law on the interior.
The Department of the Interior has declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time. Currently, there are 40 million people depending on it for water. Farmers and ranchers also rely on the Colorado river to produce their crops. If immigration-driven population growth, driven by federal government policies, continues at its current pace, water resources will be put under even more stress.
Immigration is a top issue for American voters as the border crisis continues unabated. The Biden Administration's failure to take effective actions to secure the border, and in many ways actively encouraging more illegal border crossings, is hurting the President's approval rating with voters.
What's a pundit to do when his commitment to ever-increasing immigration makes it much more difficult to achieve realistic policy goals he claims to care about? If he works for The New York Times there's a good chance he'll just ignore the contradiction and keeping penning paeans to the cure-all powers of immigration-driven growth.
Biden's approval ratings on immigration have plummeted, and Latino voters in Texas are the tip of the down-facing arrow. But Biden is hardly alone.
As Obama indicated in his interview, there is a tension between Americans' openness to the world and America's ability to absorb the world. The benefits of moderate immigration levels include tight labor markets, better wages, more economic opportunities for women and the less-skilled, less demand on resources and infrastructure, greater access to the outdoors, and greater hope for protecting wildlife and wildlands, and open spaces.
We are moving further away from a system we can sustain.
It doesn’t take a council of economic advisors to explain the law of supply and demand to the president of the United States, but it helps to have them around if you want to muddy the waters, or “short-circuit” wage gains.
Sunday night the Senate Parliamentarian upheld the common sense proposition that immigration legislation providing amnesty to at least 8 million people is not primarily a budgetary matter ripe for budget reconciliation. Immediately, the outcry from the proponents for declaring immigration simply a budgetary matter was to either ignore the decision or offer alternative immigration provisions that would reach the same goal. Unfortunately, the option more likely to succeed is ripping up the rules of the Senate once and for all.
The Ninth Circuit, always on the cutting edge of judicial madness, ruled that an alien cannot be deported after being convicted of driving drunk TWICE with his children in the vehicle. With Democrats in Congress debating amnesty for millions, including convicted criminals, this ruling is a good example of the reality behind the "glass half-full" messaging surrounding immigration and crime.